The police will continue to be happy with emailed GARs (when required under the Terrorism Act – but as per the above post / Bosco’s post sGAR also sends these to the police) – but the Home Office/Border Force won’t accept GARs by email any longer, so for that you need to use sGAR/an alternative approved method.
Indochine wrote:
The police will continue to be happy with emailed GARs (when required under the Terrorism Act – but as per the above post / Bosco’s post sGAR also sends these to the police) – but the Home Office/Border Force won’t accept GARs by email any longer, so for that you need to use sGAR/an alternative approved method.
Just to add to my post, for clarity, the legal instrument requiring GARs to be submitted to Border Force via sGAR or an approved third party application is regulation 5(1) of the The General Aviation (Persons on Board, Flight Information and Civil Penalties) Regulations 2024, which came into force on 6 April 2024.
This is distinct from the requirement notify certain flights to the the police where those flights involve the common travel area: this is required under the Terrorism Act 2000.
sGAR should do both (GAR to Border Force and the police). But in certain circumstances, e.g. Northern Ireland to England/Scotland/Wales, a GAR is not required, but police notification might be (depending on whether the arrival and departure airfields have a police designation). In that case, you could just email the relevant police force(s) with details of your flight. But flights that require a GAR (e.g. arrivals in the UK from outside the CTA) require that GAR to be submitted in an approved manner.
The Home Office presentation yesterday said that email was no acceptable as they needed the data inputted into their system in a certain way so that it could be processed and the appropriate response message issued. As for why they couldn’t build a system that simply parses an email they didn’t say .. indeed the sGAR website allows you to upload most of the data using the old Excel template.
Thank you very much for the legal reference. Very useful.
Following some Guernsey GAR discussion here, here is their new GAR form (which Guernsey insisted on)
Still using .doc format 17 years after it was deprecated, I see!
Deprecated by who?
Terrible word… always smells of some Big Corporate trying to push out a new product when the old one worked perfectly well 
A first for me today!
When I landed at Duxford after a flight from Deauville, I was greeted by two friendly Border Force officers who were waiting for me and my family.
They checked our passports and reassured us, saying, “We’re here just to raise awareness about the new procedures. You did everything right, so don’t worry.”
I must say it was a surprise but a pleasant experience and chat.
It turns out that earlier, a German pilot had landed without submitting a General Aviation Report (GAR). The officers mentioned they didn’t fine him because the “rules had changed only a few weeks ago.”
That’s funny; those rules had never changed The GAR was not enforced until about 2010 but since then it’s always been there. I think they just don’t do fines anyway.
Yes they are nowadays very polite. My last bad experience (with the obligatory crash course on sarcasm, which the UK police were famous for) was in 2006, EGJJ-EGKA, no GAR, and my excuse was a mistake on the GAR form guidance notes, which the police were completely uninterested in!
Deprecated by pretty much anyone. The doc format is pretty nasty, it’s basically a binary format that is a bunch of serialised OLE binary objects (OLE also being deprecated) and often only renders correctly in the exact version of Microsoft Word that generated it. None of it is well documented, and the last version of Word that didn’t support docx is now 17 years old and full of security exploits. If it’s all that Guernsey can accept then it’s a bit problematic. The docx format isn’t all that nice but at least it’s stable and documented by the ECMA.
Fortunately various programming libraries still support doc (both generation and reading), but they probably won’t forever.
“Deprecated” is a pretty common word in the world of software development. It means “it still works, but you’re on notice it’s going away some time in the future”.
UKBF turned up for the aircraft inbound last Thursday. I went over and asked them if they was checking me outbound, of which they wasn’t. I then got into conversation and they told me they would (Working hours permitted) be turning up for almost every flight for the foreseeable future.
Normally a risk assessment causes a knee jerk reaction like this. Is it the Emiliano Sala thing, or something else?
